ImmaRussian t1_ixjrx01 wrote
Reply to comment by ImmaRussian in [WP] The ritual calls for 100 sacrifices, but after reading it carefully you realize that it never specified they had to be human. Deciding to be the smartass that you are, you got a petri dish full of bacteria and sacrificed them instead. by Prompt_Dude
The summoning had failed.
The dwarf Haemar shrugged and issued a sound of frustrated boredom, "I don't know what you thought you'd get, laddie, they're just small 'uns, if they be even there like ye says. What could they possibly do for us?"
The young mage Archaeus stood silent still though. Everything in the books indicated that this should have succeeded. The discovery of these cells was new, and much about them was still not understood, but his refraction spell had allowed him to see the cells on the plate and count them; there were plenty for his purpose, and he had modified the summoning spell to account for the new sacrifice source.
"This should have worked. We should be seeing a demon here."
Haemar raised an eyebrow, "We really are be desperate then, eh? I wouldn't have thought it to you to take up that kind of summons. You know, you might could warn me before summoning one of those? I thought ye were just carrying some basic hurt upon them out there.", and he gestured towards the door.
They were locked in a closet in a castle keep. Archaeus and Haemar were two remnants of the broken and fleeing army of the Faer. The revolution had been burning, simmering for years, but until ten years ago it had been largely ignored by the mages, merchants, and other powerful members of The Faeran League, an alliance of might, magic, and money which, in spite of shifting allegiance and the rare upheaval among the upper echelons, had kept peace in the world for almost a millennium.
There had always been voices dissatisfied with how that alliance ruled though, who believed that the relative peace of the league brought with it a stability which was also a cage upon the creative energy of humanity. Concessions had been made in the last fifty years. The establishment of a Society of Rational Observation, dedicated to discovering the mundane truths of the world for the purpose of furthering the ability of the non-magical peoples to help themselves in the absence of magic users. The change was hotly debated, and for decades after its first proposal, generally ignored, but as word spread among the lower echelons that such a thing might even be feasible, it became necessary for the Three Councils to acknowledge the demand.
Five years ago, the explosion at the Primae Capitol of Ars Maleus had changed everything. The entire council, the entire Primae Capitol, and the entire surrounding countryside, was vaporized in an instant.
"You know... I've never said this to anyone, but I tell you, Malvina was right, and I believe that's what caused the explosion, and if I could just use it to cast this spell, we could summon a demon powerful enough to destroy the entire rebellion."
"I dain't know who Malvina is, but let's get a thing straight; you could cast this spell; I want nothin' and no part of what ye do here. Come now, I think it's time we acknowledge we've been beat. Maybe this new world of theirs won't be so bad. I know that sounds barmy coming from me, but I know when I'm beat, and we're beat, so what's the use in fightin' it?"
"Some dwarf you are; where's your stubborn-"
Haemar punched him in the shoulder, "Don't be that way; that's a sham notion an' ye know it. Haven't ye known me long enough to know better? Come on... Just cast some kind o' calmin' spell to make sure they actually capture us instead o' just murderin' us on the spot, and let's get out there."
Archaeus looked down at his last desperate attempt at resistance and muttered "I know it would sound crazy, but I swear Malvina was right... I swear her experiment caused the explosion..."
A minute later, they stepped out of the closet and into a dining hall full of rabble and celebration. It took a minute for one of the revelers to realize that the odd pair who stepped out of the closet was of a different cut. The dwarf with the General's insignia put down his drink and said "Hold it; that's a magus... I mean... They look to be surrendering, so I guess we'd better.. You know, take 'em in. Maria, see if you can figure out where they were hiding; there might be more."
Maria heard the order and stopped dancing, and put her drink down, inspecting the closet door Archaeus and Haemar had just emerged from.
"... Was there always a closet door here?"
The general inspected it briefly too, and said "Looks like a concealment spell... Gads, if they'd had any artefacts with any power in there, they could have really done us in. Someone stop the music, we need to check the rest of the Keep for hidden doors before we can let down our guard."
Maria looked closer at the table in the closet, "Looks like they were attempting some sort of spell. Thankfully they didn't have the strength to complete it though, looks like. I only know a little of the language of magic, but it looks like maybe a summon? Not sure what of though?"
The general blew on the circle of dust, creating a light show in miniature as the dust sparkled in the light from outside the closet, "Well it ain't goin' to get summoned now, whatever it was."
The revelry continued into the night after the castle had been checked for secret doors; two more hidden groups were discovered. One put up a fight; the other surrendered peaceably. The League had finally fallen. The dream of a century of labor and struggle had finally been realized, and the magic of the world could now be put to use for the benefit of all rather than to keep afloat an oppressive alliance of all the great powers used to hold one people in the control of another. It was a time of great celebration throughout the land, unless, of course, you happened to be a loyalist magi, a member of the Society of Capital, or a member of the Elodian Society.
There was admittedly some excess in the process of correcting the imbalances of the world. Magi who had done no wrong were punished at times simply for being magi, and in areas which had suffered particularly harshly at the hands of the old League, the new Council of Citizens was hard pressed to protect them and keep the peace. Redistribution of the productive implements of society sometimes took the form of punitive retribution against those implements' former owners, and again, the Council was sometimes unable to prevent these acts of retribution. And the last spark of loyalist resistance was not fully extinguished for another year. In the region of Amiraan, loyalist magi managed to condemn a whole crop to failure, and they, along with all the former members of the region's local Society of Capital, were gruesomely murdered and eaten that winter.
The new Council of Citizens' greatest problem though, came about slowly, insidiously.
Two months after the victory celebration and the raising of the Citizens' banner over the Stronghold of the Capitol Secundus, which had become defacto the Primae Capitol after the Great Explosion, a malady became known in the capitol. It began slowly, as a shortness of breath, but without a cough or any other symptoms. As it progressed, the shortness of breath worsened, and a few months after first noticing the shortness of breath, their eyes would begin to turn yellow and bloodshot. Two months in, there were 12 afflicted, including Maria and her commanding officer, and a number of prisoners of war. Four months later, it was known to be spreading quickly through the prison camp, in a single massive wave, but through what mechanism none could say.
It wasn't until 6 months after victory though, that the first great wave of affliction was noticed by the non-prisoner population. The Council began isolating those afflicted in the hopes of inhibiting its spread, but by the end of the year, they realized they had begun the isolation measure far too late.
ImmaRussian t1_ixjs07b wrote
Within a year, it afflicted almost the entire population of prisoners, and by the second year, they were all either dead or comatose, able to breathe without obstruction, but apparently unable to enjoy the effects of the air they had taken in. While this rid the council of a very tricky problem, what to do with the large population of captured loyalists, it was also a forewarning of a massive tragedy looming for the entire world.
By the second year, the affliction had spread to half of the known world, and a full half of the citizens of the newly renamed Capitol Civitas were either dead or dying. The Society of Rational Observation had been called upon to discover the mechanism by which the disease spread, but their findings, only reached after another full year of experimentation, only confirmed the worst:
The disease was transmitted from person to person by some form of close contact, however the delay between when it could be transmitted, and when the infected began to show signs of affliction, was at least a full month. Sometimes several. A single infected person could live in a city for a full month, infecting others without any knowledge of it, before they even began to notice the slightest shortness of breath.
The Council devoted its resources to combating the virus, to isolating entire villages, but they faced the frustrating prospect that by sending out emissaries to warn people and enforce isolation, they might very well be hastening the spread of the illness, since the emissaries would have to be dispatched from the center of administrative power in the world, which also happened to be where the virus was most widespread.
And over all, the pall of doom also hung, because knowing that they were likely already infected by an illness with no cure, they were all acutely aware that they would likely catch themselves feeling an unusual faintness from a minor exertion some day, and they knew that when they did, it would foretell the end.
They began to explore methods of treatment, in a veritable panic, for by then, it had become clear that even if it took between one and two years, the illness did not subside or leave once present, and it was always fatal. In the fourth year since victory, with as many towns and villages isolated as possible, receiving and sending missives and reports to the empire at large entirely from purpose-built signal towers, the ever-shrinking population of the Society of Rational Observation stumbled across a method binding together the employ of magic and machinery. By heating certain materials, and using magic to permeate the cells of an afflicted person with the gases emitted by those materials, a breathless person could be revived temporarily from their stupor, and if a spell was cast to make the transfer happen continuously, a person could live indefinitely as long as the spell was maintained.
Enchanted capsules of the pressurized gaseous products of the burned materials began to be manufactured and distributed to citizens of the capitol; first to the members of the Society, then to anyone else who could be reached.
In spite of the extremely broad, nearly unlimited support and love the Council of Citizens had enjoyed on the day of its final victory over the Old Regime, it was not immune to the panic and fear engendered by the spread of this new illness. Initially it was believed to be some trick of the Magi as they raged against the dying of their League, and people rallied even closer around the Citizens Council and the administration it oversaw. However, with time, people grew frustrated by the council's inability to end the crisis, and while villages which had managed to isolate in time were very effectively held in captivity by their own fear, in regions which were infected, unrest and chaos began to take root.
Until the word spread of a cure. A cure which could only be created by the great industrial resources, magical knowledge, and technical expertise available at the Capitol. The capitol made its best effort to distribute these new devices throughout the world, but there were simply too few to distribute to everyone.
They were forced to prioritize the regions which were best able to produce the resources which were used to produce more of the devices. This created further resentment on the part of those living in regions which were not able to provide those resources, and by virtue of the enormous urgency of the pressure placed on the Council to maintain order, thus began a policy of preferential treatment which slowly evolved into a policy of control by the mechanism of threatening to withhold the Vapor of Life from entire towns and regions. In spite of its best intentions, the Council had finally come full circle, and the exigencies of reality had transformed it into the very thing it sought to destroy.
All because one mage, in his foolishness, had accidentally summoned a demon, and had, more successfully than he would ever know, managed to replace in the summoning spell all referential forms of humanity with those of microbes. The "Demon Sickness" (which was, again, more accurate than anyone could possibly know) came to define the landscape of society for generations upon generations to come. But time moves only in one direction, and all stasis must eventually give way to change.
As the miners wordlessly mined in the rock for materials to extract mercury, one of the materials needed for the Vapor of Life, they exchanged nervous glances. They knew their work was illegal, and that, if caught, their entire province could be punished, but without an independent secret stockpile of apparatus for infusing the Vapor of Life, their plans would grind to a halt within months. A second revolution was brewing. As with all revolutions, those planning it believed it to be inevitable, but, again as with all revolutions, time alone would tell.
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